Philosophaster wrote:It sounds really similar to something that Daniel Dennett said, that he suspects that more people "believe in belief," believe that it's a "good thing" to believe in God, than actually believe in God.

I'd agree with this based on real interactions I've had with religious people. Quite a few of them assume that because I reject their religion, I "believe in nothing." They insist that "you have to believe in something!"

It's the certainty and security in religious beliefs that attracts people to them. The specific question of which god and which belief is less important. The form religion takes is primarily dependent on where one happens to be born.

Technically, one could argue that both sale and consequent respect of another's purchasing rights based on collective agreement as to what constitutes ownership is use by everyone.

A great part of human activity is economic; denying our right to be economical with our land makes a lot of noble human behaviour seem evil.

Natives have always seemed collectively greedy. The entire Western hemisphere is their land, even though it was clearly conquered by a powerful invading army. But they use double-speak to also consider it nobody's land (if they can't have it, noone can). This hypocricy reveals the base motivations of a group trying to rebound from a humiliating defeat that wiped out their entire primitive culture, rather than a graceful and enlightened concession to defeat, and quiet transition into the conquerers' mightier empire.

Uh huh. That's why the "best man" in Native ceremonies is the one who gives the most away. That's why whites made deserts of their lands and slaves of other men, all the while hoarding and accumulating wealth---while Natives did no such thing, taking only what they needed to live. That's why North and South America were pure, natural paradises until the white worms slithered onto the scene and fucked it all up.

Tit.

Thanks for the link, Jamesh. Good, wise stuff. It's truly refreshing to hear from honourable men like those, especially today, when honour is just "illogical," because, well, it is...

General Jackson, I am not afraid of you. I fear no man, for I am a Creek warrior. I have nothing to request in behalf of myself; you can kill me, if you desire. But I come to beg you to send for the women and children of the war party who are now starving in the woods. Their fields and cribs have been destroyed by your people, who have driven them to the woods without an ear of corn. I hope that you will send out parties who will safely conduct them here in order that they may be fed. I exerted myself in vain to prevent the massacre of the women and children at Fort Mims. I am now done fighting. The Red Sticks are nearly all killed.

I have done the white people all the harm I could. I have fought them, and fought them bravely. If I had an army I would yet fight, and contend to the last. But I have none. My people are all gone. I can now do no more than weep over the misfortunes of my Nation.

There was a time when I had a choice and could have answered you; I have none now. Even hope has ended. Once I could animate my warriors to battle, but I cannot animate the dead. My warriors can no longer hear my voice. Their bones are at Talladega, Tallashatchie, Emunckfow and Tohopeka. If I had been left to contend with the Georgia Army, I would have raised corn on one bank of the river and fought them on the other. But your people have destroyed my Nation. I rely on your generosity.

Jamesh wrote:"Everything is caused" is not an entirely correct statement. A truer one is that everything is constantly causing. In reality there are no effects, one is always viewing causes in action. At no point is any thing truely static, and I mean any thing, even space. (Re Space - I'm a dualist who believes that two opposite fundamental forces, Expansion and Contraction, create and are all things, as well as permanently creating each other. If we can observe something such as space or time, then they must be caused by something active. In being caused by something active they also must be active causal agents. The whole of existence is a continual two-way flow from an infinitely expansion pyramidal base to infinitely finite contractive point at the top. All things are just combinations of many layers of this process).

God to be infinite would need to have some form of absolute staticness. It could not be subject to change or causes. If something is not subject to causes then it would have to be outside of the universe, rather than actually being the universe. If something was outside the universe and not subject to causes, then it could not in return be a causal agent that could act upon the universe.

War and Peace - Terrorists and Weapons of Mass Destruction - 22 November 2002
World Outlook - China and its Challenges - 3 September 2004
World Outlook - The New Global Mosaic - 28 July 2003
Indigenous Issues - Redfern Speech (Year for the world's Indigenous People) - 10 December 1992 (the orgs he set up have failed, but he lost gov in 96. Nor do I neccessarily agree that the maintenance of the aboriginal culture is realistic)

Young Paul left school at 15 and joined the NSW Labor Party. He worked as a sales assistant at a Sydney department store, David Jones, but this was not his forte and his employment papers were marked ' never to be re-employed'.

At bottom, one experience has the same essential character as any other. One single experience is all it takes to become wise; it's just a matter of how one thinks about the nature of that one experience.

“We stumbled on in the darkness, over big stones and through large puddles, along the one road running through the camp. The accompanying guards kept shouting at us and driving us with the butts of their rifles. Anyone with very sore feet supported himself on his neighbor's arm. Hardly a word was spoken; the icy wind did not encourage talk. Hiding his hand behind his upturned collar, the man marching next to me whispered suddenly: "If our wives could see us now! I do hope they are better off in their camps and don't know what is happening to us."

“That brought thoughts of my own wife to mind. And as we stumbled on for miles, slipping on icy spots, supporting each other time and again, dragging one another on and upward, nothing was said, but we both knew: each of us was thinking of his wife. Occasionally I looked at the sky, where the stars were fading and the pink light of the morning was beginning to spread behind a dark bank of clouds. But my mind clung to my wife's image, imagining it with an uncanny acuteness. I heard her answering me, saw her smile, her frank and encouraging look. Real or not, her look then was more luminous than the sun which was beginning to rise.

“A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth--that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love. I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world may still know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved. In a position of utter desolation, when a man cannot express himself in positive action, when his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way--an honorable way--in such a position man can, through loving contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved, achieve fulfillment. For the first time in my life, I was able to understand the words, "The angels are lost in perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory."

“In front of me a man stumbled and those following him fell on top of him. The guard rushed over and used his whip on them all. Thus my thoughts were interrupted for a few minutes. But soon my soul found its way back from the prisoners existence to another world, and I resumed talk with my loved one: I asked her questions, and she answered; she questioned me in return, and I answered...

“My mind still clung to the image of my wife. A thought crossed my mind: I didn't even know if she were still alive, and I had no means of finding out (during all my prison life there was no outgoing or incoming mail); but at that moment it ceased to matter. There was no need to know; nothing could touch the strength of my love, and the thoughts of my beloved. Had I known then that my wife was dead, I think that I still would have given myself, undisturbed by that knowledge, to the contemplation of that image, and that my mental conversation with her would have been just as vivid and just as satisfying. ‘Set me like a seal upon thy heart, love is as strong as death.’"

Orwell wrote:His mind slid away into the labyrinthine world of doublethink. To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully-constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them; to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy; to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again; and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself. That was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word ‘doublethink’ involved the use of doublethink.

This is interesting and correlates with the world outside the novel in various ways, where the words "hypocritical" or "sophisticated" are often used in place of the word "doublethink," and one way of interest that comes to mind is the nature of actual assertions that people publicly make. For example, Obama’s word de jour is “balanced,” which is a huge clue that unbalanced is in fact the reality. False assertions of reality such as stressing the palliative “balanced,” are either wishful thinking or deliberate propaganda. I think that the case of a calculating politician reading prepared text from a teleprompter indicates the latter, which would mean that characterizing the method of this politician as propagandizing is a truthful observation rather than unsubstantiated cynicism. A less generous labeling would simple be to call him a liar.

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“He hoped and prayed that there wasn't an afterlife. Then he realized there was a contradiction involved here and merely hoped that there wasn't an afterlife.”
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